BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — Low-flying NATO bombers destroyed a bridge between two Serbian river towns Sunday, toppling cars into the water and killing at least nine civilians in a midday strike near a crowded riverfront market, witnesses said.
The attack left six people missing in the Velika Morava River and 28 injured, officials said. Some of the victims had rushed onto the span to help people wounded by the initial strike when two more bombs hit seven minutes later, townspeople told reporters at the scene in Varvarin, 90 miles south of here.
A later airstrike wounded two European journalists and killed a driver in their convoy in Kosovo--the Serbian province where NATO is trying to halt a brutal government crackdown on ethnic Albanian civilians. Serbia is Yugoslavia's main republic.
Scenes of the wrecked bridge on television here and around the world dealt a new blow to NATO's credibility as Western leaders were pressing to isolate Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from his people.
The Yugoslav government, which has been trying to rally public support for Milosevic since his indictment last week by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, seized on the apparent NATO blunder as evidence that the Western alliance's nearly 10-week-old air assault is aimed at ordinary civilians, not just their leader.
"NATO criminals picked a market day to carry out their attack," said the newscaster on state TV, noting that Varvarin's outdoor produce market stretches along the river near one end of the two-lane bridge.
In acknowledging that allied planes had attacked the bridge, NATO officials in Brussels said it was a legitimate target. The alliance has acknowledged killing civilians in at least 11 previous errant attacks but insists that all such casualties are unintentional. Yugoslav authorities say more than 240 civilians have died in those attacks.
Varvarin, a town of 5,000 people, is about 50 miles north of Kosovo. NATO says it has been bombing highways and bridges in the area to cut Yugoslav army supply lines into the province--the scene of 15 months of guerrilla war between the government and ethnic Albanian separatists.
"If it is a military target, why did they not hit it at night?" Dragoljub Stanojevic, the school principal in Varvarin, asked reporters at the scene as divers searched for victims.
